Chapter One Hundred and Four

Chapter One Hundred and Four
Sky’s POV

We moved like a shadow through the wood, a slow, deliberate tide of bodies and breath. The soldiers ahead and behind kept their mouths shut, only the soft scrape of boots on damp leaves and the occasional clink of harness broke the hush.

The air held that washed-out smell after rain, earth and wet pine, and the faint metallic tang of weapons. My cloak was damp where the drizzle had soaked it, but I hardly felt it. My palms were steady, my heart, for once, behaved.

I had rehearsed this moment in my head so many times that it had started to feel like something already lived, the crack of a gate, the hollow echo of a lord’s laugh, the bright flash of steel.

When you spend your life hunted and hiding, planning becomes its own kind of armor. But even armor can rust if you let fear do the work for you.

We were close now. I knew the path by instinct, the one I’d taken that day I ran. Images rose up without any invitation, the cold moon on my skin, the taste of blood in my mouth, the hands that had grabbed and shoved and called me a thing.

I remembered the other women, the way they’d been held down, their faces hollow, the way I’d ran through the hallway and left their screams behind like a bad dream I had no right to wake from. Guilt sits in a place that never forgets, no matter how loud you try to drown it.

This morning, the plan had been carved like a map on my skin. We would move at dawn, hit the houses where the markets took their goods, tear the chains out of their hands. I was supposed to be the signal, a flare in the dark that would make the doors open and the men rush out, thinking to catch a thief, a trespasser.

Kael had frowned when I told him. “Too close,” he’d said. “If they recognize you—”

“I won’t let them,” I said, breath hushed. It wasn’t bravado or anything like it. I had learned to say words like armor too.

He didn’t argue after that. Maybe because he trusted me. Maybe because he’d seen me survive where others would have crumbled. Or maybe he knew that letting me do this would make the rest of the men move without questioning the plan. Either way, his hand had hovered at my elbow for the barest second, then gone. That second felt like an anchor and a promise both.

Now, pushing through the last dark fingers of the forest, the trees thinned. The ground opened to a field and, beyond it, the house I had left behind, a squat, ugly thing of whitewashed stone and a low, arched gate.

It sat as if no time had passed: the same moss on the stones, the same crooked shutters. Sunlight pooled in the puddles by the gate, blinding in places. Smoke crawled up from a kitchen chimney.

A lead scout moved ahead and signaled a halt. The men melted into the trees, folding into shadow like practiced ghosts. Mira and Rendall were near the command tent. I could see them in the wavering light, their faces tight with focus. Kael stood a little apart, his jaw set, watching the house the way a wolf watches a bone. He caught my eye and inclined his head once, a wordless query. I gave him my little nod, the signal that I was ready.

“Go,” he murmured and I walked out.

Stepping into open space felt like stepping onto a stage. The wind lifted my hair and threw it across my face; I smoothed it back with small, practiced movements.

The guards at the gate saw me long before I reached them. They were two men, older than some of the girls who’d been sold in the market. One had a scar across his temple, the other chewed the inside of his cheek and pretended I wasn’t the thing that stirred his attention.

I kept my hands where they could be seen. I let my heels click once on stone so it sounded ordinary, voluntary. Pride can be an armor too, and acting like someone who belonged here made them lower their guard.

“Good morning,” I called out, my voice light. “I’d like to speak with the lord of the house.”

They exchanged glances and laughed. It was small, a cocky sound that tried to fill the gate yard and failed. “No visitors,” the one with the scar said, and then, with the kind of casual cruelty I’d encountered too many times, he added, “Move along, girl.”
The guard to my right leaned in, his eyes rating me like a butcher sizing up meat. There was a familiarity in the look, a low hunger that had nothing to do with hunger. I had seen that type before, men who measured a woman’s worth in coin and appetite.

They kept me waiting as if it were a sport. I let them.

I studied the guard to the right the way they had studied me: the angle of his jaw, the set of his hands, the way his weight favored one foot. Little things, but things that move in the body like tiny confessions. The other guard leaned to the left, distracted by someone who passed by. For a sliver of silence, the world reduced to their breathing and the beat of my heart.

I raised my hand.

It should have been a small, meaningless motion, a slight lift to show I meant no sudden violence, but then something in their faces changed. The guard to my right straightened as if pulled on a string, his eyes going narrow. The left followed, like a mirror image. They were the kind to snap to attention at the sight of a woman alone.

I had their focus and I made sure every movement from me had it pinned to myself and not to the hundreds of soldiers hiding in the forest. Not to the few commanding generals who had led armies to war and back. Not to the Alpha King himself who came to see this through.

And that was their mistake.

I was sure we all heard it, the hissing in the air that pulled their attention, but they never saw it coming until it was too late.

The first guard took an arrow straight to the soft place under his jaw, just where the neck meets the skull. His head snapped, eyes widening with disbelief, and he crashed forward in a heap. Blood hit the stone with a loud, sick thud.

The second guard spun too soon, the motion of surprise favoring him for only an instant. But Kael's archers were faster, more precise as the second arrow found its mark on the guards head.

He dropped like a puppet whose strings had been cut, his body going limp.

For a moment the world held its breath. The birds stopped in the trees. I watched the two men fall as if they were no more than empty shells.

But I didn't feel an ounce of remorse for them.